non-mon
This thesis used a three-pronged test to evaluate an electoral system’s fulfillment of the democratic principle (what Hanner calls the demos criterion):
i. Are voters able to express their preferences on the ballot thoroughly and with sufficient nuance?
ii. Are voters chiefly incentivized to express their sincere preferences on the ballot?
iii. Does the resulting Chamber reflect the public, given the means of tabulating preferences expressed on voters’ ballots?" (p. 2)
Hanner looked at whether voter has options and is incentivized to use them and whether the voting system shows nuance in voters' choices. STV shine in all three.
The "three prongs" are expressed in negative as voter is incentivized to engage in strategic voting,
voter is expected to have deeper knowledge of politics than usual, resutling chamber is not proportional.
Hanner expresses it well -- voter is expected to have deeper knowledge of politics than usual, -- that is, "We can reasonably expect voters to have a first preference and perhaps one ore more subordinate preferences, as well as one or more clear adversary candidates for whom they have a well-defined preference to rank lowest." And we can expect voter to have no more than this, other than perhaps a favoured party to which he or she would like their vote used to elect anyone on that party slate.
Hanner said the Borda count is a ranked-vote system based on weighted points rather than reallocation like STV, ...
makes point that some say even nearest contender should be regarded as effective vote under FPTP but even then STV shines.
the thesis copies elements of my five-level approach to elections in the majoritarian principle section see "reflecting my 5-level election analysis" below
Hanner spends considerable time refuting the following charges against STV:
Complexity.
Supposed problem of voter confusion under STV
Ballot Exhaustion.
(Misuse of terms leads to unfounded charges against STV vs. FPP (the debate is clouded by inconsistent and often conflated terminology))
Majoritarian Principles.
Minority Representation. (some opponents say minority rep. is not useful or conversely that FPTP produces minority representation)
Value of Subsequent Preferences. (STV simulates perfect voter information)
Coalition Government. (coalitions under STV may have a different character than
coalition government under FPTP)
FPTP sometimes elects exotic member in an exceptional district or through vote splitting; STV does not.
Strategic voting
STV's non-monotonicity (theoretically it could happen but how often in real life is unclear and anyway voters cannot use it to advantage themselves, cannot plan it in advance)
=====
this list of arguments is followed by:
weaknesses of FPTP recapped
Concluding remarks
========================
In Hanner's words:
...
The purpose of this paper is not to develop a comprehensive theory of democracy, however, but rather to compare a number of electoral systems. The account of representative democracy as derived to approximate pure democracy, from which the demos criterion is derived, is by no means universally accepted. It does, however, have broad and mainstream acceptance; furthermore, the resulting three-pronged test to evaluate an electoral system may also be compatible with some alternate accounts of democracy.
The assumptions surrounding the demos criterion are therefore taken as given here for the sake of the discussion.
Second, the demos criterion is merely a first principle, not a panacea. Even with a good electoral system, democratic ills such as unfairly drawn districts, low civic engagement, or tyranny of the majority may arise in a society. Some STV advocates argue that trickle-down effects from the system will ultimately correct these ills, but such claims are also beyond the scope of this paper. For the purpose of comparing electoral systems, we will assume a well-composed civil society, with no interest in creating an unfair social order or oppressing certain groups.
...
The Single Transferable Vote.
STV is a voting system designed to compose Chambers rather than elect unitary positions such as president or mayor. Under STV, a society is divided into a number of electoral districts, each with two or more seats. Five seats per district is generally suggested as optimal for achieving proportional representation of the populace while not overwhelming voters with a crowded and potentially confusing ballot.
Voters rank candidates on their ballot in order of preference, and may list as many or as few names as they choose. [only one preference on each ballot will be used to elect someone]
To win a seat, a candidate must obtain a number of votes equal to a number called the Droop quota. [actually you can win a seat without quota.]
This is the smallest number of votes needed by a single candidate in a given STV election such that every district seat will ultimately be filled. The Droop quota is not a specific, constant number, but is instead calculated on an election-by-election basis. After ballots are initially counted, any candidate who meets or exceeds the Droop quota with first-choice votes wins a seat. If the district has any unfilled seats remaining, winning candidates’ excess votes beyond the Droop quota are reallocated and moved to ballots’ second choices.
If reallocation still does not fill every district seat, then there is a plurality runoff. [plurality run-off implies single winner. but I like use of the run-off term for the gradual thinning down of the field of candidates by elimination of the least-popular candidate..]
The candidate with the fewest current votes is eliminated, and those votes are given to each ballot’s next highest preference. This process is repeated until all seats in the district are filled[ or unilt the field of candite is thinned to number of remaining open seats.]
The full procedure of an STV election can be visualized more concisely in the following flow chart."
...
STV and the Demos Criterion.
There are a number of ways in which STV is structurally designed to fulfill the demos
criterion.
STV empowers voters through diversity of choice, because each district has multiple seats to fill and voters are incentivized to rank candidates in order of sincere preference. [diversity of choice includes mutlipe candidates of the same party; voters can mark sincere preference becasue if the vore is placed oan an un-electable candidate the vote may in many cases be transferred.]
At the same time, STV makes realistic assumptions about voter knowledge, allowing voters to rank as many or as few candidates as they choose, with no electoral penalty or advantage from either choice. [yes, there may be a penalty if the voter does not mark enough mark-up preferences -- the vote may be wasted but waste is never more than encountered under FPTP.]
The results of STV elections can be calculated with relative speed and ease,5 especially given technological advances since the system was devised.
Most importantly, STV is designed to yield a proportional representation of voter preferences. Because STV uses multi-member districts, majority and minority groups can elect a number of officials comparable to their proportional weight within the district. This is an advantage over any voting system with single-member districts, even those such as the Alternative Vote, a system identical to STV but which elects only a single winner.
Although STV does tend to award seats to political parties proportionally, it is unmistakably a system designed around candidates, not parties. In fact, an STV election could be held entirely without the artifice of political parties.
8 This feature of privileging individuals (both as voters and candidates) over parties is one of STV’s advantages. Political parties may be valuable, but they are not ends in themselves. They are useful for arranging political actors into organized groups based on common policy stances and preferences, and also serve valuable administrative functions during the process of governing itself. At the site of elections, however, it is most important under the demos criterion to compose a Chamber proportionally representative of voter preferences, whether or not such a composition lines up with party vote shares.
STV also tends to maximize the percentage of effective ballots, i.e. those used to elect a winning candidate. The maximum possible proportion of ineffective ballots (those not cast for a winner) under STV is Droop quota / total valid votes plus 1
[actually if he means percentage, he should have said this formula: "(Droop quota / total valid votes plus 1) times 100".
But actually if each member wins by quota, the most ineffective votes is quota minus the number of seats.
If each successful winner receive the quota, then the number of effective votes will be valid votes minus a little less than Droop.
5-seat proof:
say 1200 votes and five seats, Droop is 201.
if each winner takes Droop, winners take 1005 votes, leaving 195 as ineffective.
However even that formula is only accurate conditionally --
As normally every winner elected with quota in the first count exceeds quota, although surplus votes generally do not stay with the successful candidate, that means those candidates can be counted as receiving more than the quota. They almost always take more votes than the mere Droop indicated in Hanner's formula, and never fewer.
As well, that 1005 proportion of effective votes (n times quota) is not the case in many or most elections, where one or more candidates win at the end with less than quota, so that means quota cannot be taken as base to calculate the effective vote portion, except as rough rule.
And a rough rule should not use terms like maximum or minimum.]
[Quota varies, Effective votes vary]
Because the Droop quota and total number of ballots cast is different in every election, this percentage [the number of votes that make up quota] will also vary. Models, however, tend to estimate an average ineffective ballot percentage in STV elections of about 15-20 percent. Actual STV election results confirm this estimate, with ineffectiveness occasionally as low as 11%.
[ the source for the 11 percent figure cannot be tracked down online so I am not sure if the source provides an actual election that where the 11 percent figure for ineffective votes was actual fact. But quota in a ten-seat distrcit (such as Winnipeg 1920 to 1949) would produce as few as about 10 percent or so of ineffective votes.]
In other words, roughly 80-90% of voters in a given STV election can be expected to cast a ballot that leads to the election of some candidate they feel represents them. A similar consensus is not technically impossible under existing voting systems, but to give one example, only 67 of 435 seats in the most recent U.S. House elections were won with vote shares over 80%. (and the figure of 67 includes 32 districts where no election took place in actual fact. In those districts the winner won by acclamaiton and he or she was arbitrarily awarded 100 percent of the votes even though no votes were in fact cast.]
Given these points in favor of STV, how does STV compare to other electoral systems?
Are there other systems that share the same advantages while still having more to offer?
Do arguments against STV made by advocates of other systems hold merit, and if so, are any of these arguments sufficient to discredit STV in favor of another system?
We will now turn our focus to examine three other voting systems that have directly engaged with STV: the Borda count, party-list proportional representation, and first-past-the-post.
The Borda Count.
The Borda count, like STV, is a ranking-based voting system. Similar to STV, it is also proposed as an alternative to existing voting systems, but has even less widespread adoption.
There are numerous variations on the Borda count, but in its basic form voters rank every candidate according to preference and a corresponding number of points are awarded to each candidate. For example, suppose there is an election with ten candidates running. The highest-ranked candidate on a given ballot receives ten points, the next highest ranked receives nine points, then eight points for the next highest, and so on. The scores from every ballot are pooled, and the candidate with the highest score is elected.
Prominent electoral scholar and reform advocate Michael Dummett explicitly contends that the Borda count is a superior system to STV.12 He has also developed a Borda variant called Quota/Borda that, unlike the single-member basic form, is multimember and designed to create proportional representation.
The argument in favor of the Borda count seems convincing. It can capture voter preferences and achieve popular consensus just as well as, if not better than, STV. The Quota/Borda variation especially reproduces many of STV’s benefits of proportionality and potential for minority representation.
Since the Borda count is a ranked-vote system based on weighted points rather than reallocation like STV, there are zero ineffective ballots.
Dummett also shows that, unlike STV, it is not subject to non-monotonicity (a mathematical design flaw by which more votes can actually make a candidate worse off; this will be discussed in greater depth later). [it is worth pointing out that really what is meant as proof of non-mononicity is that when one candidate gets more votes, another candidate gets fewer and that can mean the first candidate then does worse. STV's non-monotonicity, when it happens, is theoretically possible and mostly in cases where when one candidate does better and another does worse, that failing candidate's back-up preferences are not for the first one. so quite obscure case.]
The Borda count has a number of flaws, however, that cause it to fall short in its performance with respect to the demos criterion as compared to STV.
...
First, the Borda count method is susceptible to strategic voting.13 Voters are capable of expressing their sincere preferences with nuance on the ballot of a Borda count election, but the problem is they are not incentivized to do so.
...
The Borda count also makes unrealistic assumptions about voter knowledge. Unlike STV [if] voters may choose to rank any number of candidates (optional-preferential voting], voters must rank every candidate on a Borda ballot. However, most voters cannot realistically be expected to be thoroughly familiar with every candidate, especially in elections with numerous candidates running.
A voting system must effectively capture the nuance of a given voter’s preferences, but
the Borda count seeks out nuance that may not exist. We can reasonably expect voters to have a first preference and perhaps one ore more subordinate preferences, as well as one or more clear adversary candidates for whom they have a well-defined preference to rank lowest. But when it comes to ranking candidates that one has no strong feelings towards, whether positive or negative, it becomes much more difficult for a voter to clearly define their preferences.
[under Borda depending on the weighing of marked preferences, either marking just a few names is incentivized or marking all are, even if voter has no clear opinion on all of them]
[Borda and the three criterion of demos]:
i. Voters under the Borda count are able to express their full range of preferences accurately and with nuance by ranking candidates.
ii. Voters are not incentivized to express their sincere preferences. The basic Borda
count and second variant may cause many voters to express insincere preferences outside the top and bottom few rankings by requiring/incentivizing ballot completion.
The first variant incentivizes voters to express only a single preference.
iii. The Borda count may or may not form a representative Chamber. Ballots will certainly reflect some sincere preferences, but insincere rankings will likely interfere
with representative accuracy.
Furthermore, Borda Count variants make it possible for some ballots to be more ‘powerful’ than others, also obstructing representativeness. Chambers composed under the Borda count will more likely be representative when voters’ preferences are more complete and well-defined.
List PR
Proportional Representation.
We now turn our attention from a largely theoretical voting system (at least for national level elections) to the most widely adopted system in use today. Roughly 36% of countries in the world hold elections under party list proportional representation (list-PR), with an additional 17% using hybrid systems that incorporate list-PR in some way.
Under list-PR, voters cast ballots for their preferred political party rather than candidate. Seats in the Chamber are awarded to parties proportionally by vote share, but the parties themselves choose which members they want to fill their allotted seats.19 Given the sheer number of nations using list-PR, countless variations of the system of course exist, but all are variations on this basic structure.
Despite its widespread adoption, however, there are a number of structural design flaws in list-PR that make it less preferable than STV.
List-PR gives parties primacy, and voters are therefore limited from expressing sincere
preferences in two ways.
The first limitation is ballot based. Voters may only choose between a limited number of parties rather than individual candidates. This is not enough nuance to sufficiently capture a voter’s sincere preferences. Many voters may not agree with every policy stance of their preferred party. Many may strongly identify with a certain faction within the party, but not the rest of the party. Many may have a strong preference for a particular candidate, but have no electoral means to express this preference or assure that the party appoints this candidate to a seat. Even for voters who do identify closely with a particular party, preferences will always align with greater nuance to a particular candidate than the party as a whole.
The second way voters are limited under list PR is institutional. The expression of preferences under list-PR is constrained by a nation’s particular party system. Voters can only express their preferences to the degree of parties available to choose from. When there are fewer political parties, those parties will occupy larger areas on the political spectrum. Voters must cast a ballot for the party encompassing their own spatial position and simply hope that the party appoints their preferred candidate to a seat. Even if a nation has many parties that make more nuanced choice possible, voters will always be able to express greater nuance by voting for a particular candidate than a political party.
As Nicolaus Tideman puts it, “The deficiencies of [list-PR] systems compared to STV are that they presuppose that what voters care about is captured in party definitions, and they give tremendous power to party officials.” 20
Certain voting systems such as German mixed-member voting and Japanese parallel voting21 somewhat mitigate these problems by incorporating mechanisms to vote for individual candidates, but the underlying issue of party primacy still persists.
[Hanner does not consider open-list PR,. if he had, he might have been kinder to list PR.]
Nations using STV do still have political parties, and there is no reason to think parties would go extinct after a transition to STV from another system. However, parties under STV do not interfere with voters’ expression of sincere preferences. Ballots are cast directly for candidates, which not only allows voters to express their preferences with greater nuance, but also makes officials more directly accountable to voters.
Given this analysis of list-PR, how does it perform with respect to the demos criterion?
Keep in mind that there are countless list-PR variations, and each one may perform slightly better or worse on a given aspect than the basic model.
i. Voters are not able to express their preferences accurately and with nuance. Party definitions are inadequate at capturing the preferences of many voters.
ii. Voters are incentivized to express sincere preferences. Certain variants may have
more or less incentive for strategic voting, but overall the primary incentive is to vote
for one’s preferred party. The issue lies in how sincerely one actually prefers a given
party.
iii. List-PR may or may not form a representative Chamber. Since political parties have
full (or at least primary) control of appointing members to seats, much of the onus lies
on them.
Chambers composed under list-PR will more likely be representative when:
= more parties are available to choose from,
= a variant is used that gives voters some say in the specific members appointed to seats, and/or
= institutions are put in place that make parties more accountable to voters.
FPTP
Despite its popularity, simplicity, and intuitive underlying principles, FPP falls drastically short of the demos criterion, to a degree that urges a far more in-depth examination than the Borda count or list-PR voting. Borda and list-PR may not perform as well as STV with respect to the demos criterion, but they are still well-intentioned. They accept proportionality as a starting principle and recognize that a voting system should at least attempt to accurately capture voters’ sincere preferences and translate them into seat shares in the Chamber.
The same cannot be said of FPP, which does not regard proportionality as a starting principle. The disparity between the proportion of popular votes cast and the actual makeup of Chambers in countries using FPP is well-documented and troubling.
page 24
Yet despite FPP’s drawbacks, countries using the system seem fairly intent on preserving it. Part of this may well be due to transition costs; changing voting systems is a long, radical, andarduous process, and FPP does not particularly lend itself to drastic and sudden reform.
On the other hand, there is evidence that the people of FPP nations genuinely like and want to keep the system. [I disagree -- Canadian surveys show about 70 perent of people want to change to PR]
New Zealand moved from FPP to mixed-member PR in the early 1990s, but they appear to be unique.
[Many countreis have moved from FPTP to PR, but] Only one other national-level vote to transition away from FPP has ever been held, a 2011 UK referendum to adopt the Alternative Vote that was rejected by 68% of voters. [like FPTP, Alternative Voting does not regard proportionality as a starting principle. so the change perhaps occasioned less support because it would not have produced PR. ]
26Furthermore, there are a number of political writers who defend FPP and dismiss the very notion that any proportional and/or ranked-vote system, including STV, might be a better alternative. While Borda and list-PR merely take different approaches to similar goals as STV, FPP rejects most (if not all) of STV’s very foundational assumptions. As a result, there tends to be a greater prevalence and vigor of anti-STV arguments among pro-FPP writers than supporters of other systems.
For this reason, rather than focusing on FPP’s flaws, we will now examine a series of criticisms leveled against STV by FPP advocates.
The two systems will be compared on the terms of each critical argument one by one, and the validity of each claim will be evaluated.
Complexity.
One of the more fundamental accusations against STV that it is too complicated for voters to understand.27 Opponents of STV contend that determining STV winners requires arcane, non-intuitive mechanism such as Droop quotas, rank ordering, and vote reallocation. Such a lack of transparency introduces a democratic barrier between voters and their officials. [actually I think STV is quite intitutive, as Hanner propounds below]
[page 28]
FPP, on the other hand, is simple: just count up all the votes, and whoever has the most wins.
complexity is not a valid excuse to discount an entire system. While transparency may be an important consideration, electoral rules that produce accurate representation of voters in the Chamber are the foremost concern.
Regardless, the complexity of STV is far overstated. The process of calculating winners can admittedly be obtuse, but things are quite intuitive within the voting booth itself.
Voters must simply rank candidates by order of preference. They may rank only a single candidate, every name on the ballot, or anything in between; it is the voter’s choice. [yes, under optional-prefential voting but not under compulsory-preferential voting.]
While rank ordering multiple candidates is perhaps marginally more burdensome than checking a single box, it is not unnatural. It is well known by now in political science that voters have a variety of candidate preferences subsequent to their first choice. Many polls during US primary season ask voters about second choices, and these responses can significantly impact campaign strategy.
STV simply makes ranked preferences a reality on the ballot rather than a hypothetical polling question. As long as voters understand how to rank candidates and tend to express their sincere preferences, there is no primary requirement that they understand the vote tabulation process. Nevertheless, if a voter was truly curious to know what happens "behind the curtain" of an STV election, the process is not so dreadfully obtuse that they could not learn with a simple Google search and some relatively brief research.
The supposed problem of voter confusion under STV appears exaggerated in practice as well.
In 2007, some Scottish municipal elections switched from FPP to STV. FPP advocates denounced the transition as a “farce,”31 but such harsh words appear to be reaching at best. In a 2014 study, John Curtice and Michael Marsh compared evidence of voter confusion between these Scottish elections and their equivalents in Ireland, which has used STV for far longer. Scottish voters showed few signs of confusion in their first STV election, especially considering the fact that national-level and European elections, which both still used FPP, appeared on the same ballot.
The most common offense Curtice and Marsh found was straight-ticket party voting, which might be interpretable as indicating ideologically rigid voters rather than voter confusion. [in Malta under STV most voters vote straight party line. It would be a stretch to assume that they all are confused.]
Even if straight-ticket voting does indeed signal voter confusion, evidence from Ireland suggests that STV becomes more intuitive for voters over time as they grow used it, so a mildly bumpy road at the outset in Scotland should not be too concerning.
Ballot Exhaustion.
Under STV, a ballot is "exhausted" when it must be discarded because every candidate it
ranks is eliminated [or elected] before the election ends. Critics of STV point to ballot exhaustion as a severe flaw, since voters who cast ballots that become exhausted lose their say in determining the final outcome of the election.33 [Even some votes that are not exhausted do not determine winners - generally these are votes of the last eliminated candidate]
Ballot exhaustion may be perceived as particularly distasteful because it literally removes a ballot from the election. But while this seems democratically wrong on its face, a voter with an exhausted ballot has not been disenfranchised. An exhausted ballot is only removed after it has expressed at least one preference – indeed, perhaps several preferences, while only one preference [which may or may not be used to elect anyone] is possible under an FPP election. [under FPTP any vote not cast for the winner is exhausted and ineffective at same time. Under STV an exhausted votes may make up as much as a quota, while under FPTP ineffective votes may be as much as 82 percent of valid votes.]
Furthermore, the percentage of exhausted ballots may be high for a Chamber first transitioning to STV, but even opponents of the system acknowledge that this
number decreases as voters get used to the new system.34
The STV vs. FPP debate is additionally clouded by inconsistent and often conflated terminology regarding the exhaustion, wasting, and effectiveness of ballots.
Ballot exhaustion is by definition only possible under a system that uses ranking and reallocation, so FPP of course comes out on top when exhaustion is the metric of choice.
[If we look just at exhausted votes, then STV has some, while FPTP has none.
if we look at ineffective votes, then STV has 10 to 20 percent, FPTP has as many as 82 percent.]
But because the demos criterion focuses on maximizing government representation, we ought to be looking at the proportion of ballots that ultimately help put a candidate in office.
For the purpose of comparing STV with FPP, we may therefore call any ballot "ineffective" if it is exhausted or is cast for a losing candidate.
In a two-candidate FPP election, it is possible for the percentage of ineffective ballots be as high as 50 percent minus one vote – that is, every voter casting a [valid] ballot for the losing candidate in the closest possible election.
In a race of three or more candidates, the proportion of ineffective ballots may even exceed a majority. [yes, as many as 82 percent of valid votes might be ineffective]
STV, on the other hand, is designed to maximize ballot effectiveness by using multi-member districts and [transferring votes].
Under STV, the percentage of ineffective ballots cannot exceed Droop quota divided by valid votes [X 100]. [ yes, it can but as general rule, one Droop will not be used. -- see my annotation above]
While it is technically possible for a given FPP election to outperform STV in effective ballot percentage, evidence suggests this is unlikely in practice. [it does not happen often for a successful candidate in FPTP election to win more than 80 percent of the valid votes. while STV consistently produces 80 to 90 percent of effective votes]
From 1997 to 2011, roughly 85 perent of ballots in Irish STV elections were effective, with greater effectiveness produced in the districts with more seats.
In a similar time frame, only 38.8 percent of ballots cast in UK general elections were effective.38
FPP advocates will likely object to this definition of effectiveness. [they might say] A ballot cast for a candidate with a legitimate chance at winning should not be considered ineffective, even if that official does not ultimately win. This argument does carry some weight, so let us now consider effective ballots to include those cast for a runner-up as well as a winner. Under this definition, an average of 87.3% of Irish STV ballots were effective, compared to 70.2% of UK general election ballots. This is not as dismal as the previous comparison, but STV still drastically outperforms FPP.
It is difficult to gather satisfactory real-world data on STV given the small number of countries using it at the national level, and more research ought to be done on this question, but the theoretical and practical evidence appears to disfavor anti-STV arguments regarding ballot exhaustion.
Majoritarian Principles.
Proponents of FPP argue that STV undermines the democratic principle of majoritarian
rule.
Under STV, it is virtually impossible for any one candidate to gain a majority of the vote [in a district]. ["gain " is loose term. If Hanner includes receiving first-preference votes by the word "gain," then maybe not a majority but it is possible for a candidate to come close - in 1948, Ernest Manning, running in Edmonton, got 22,000 out of 46,00 valid votes in the first count. ]
[Because] A government has no mandate to rule unless it comes from a majority of the people,
[although often that is the case -- Canada has had many governments where the party in power received just a minority of valid votes - and of course to make it worse, not all the party's votes were received by the party's successful candidates],
[some say] therefore STV is incapable of establishing a valid government.
There are flaws in this line of reasoning, however. [one is that Hanner is confusing district results with make-up of the chamber, as he himself indicates next]
The first and most obvious is that only a plurality, not a majority, is necessary to win an election under FPP. [even under FPTP the majority goal is not achieved in many districts.]
Even so, the majoritarian argument against STV still does not stand. Majoritarian principles are indeed central to democracy, but only at the site of policy creation – that is, once the government has actually been composed. They do not apply at the site of elections.
The demos criterion requires that elections produce a Chamber representative of the public. Voters are not casting ballots on policy issues, but rather to elect candidates who they believe will represent them in government. At the site of elections [the district], the ruling principle is representation, not majoritarianism.
Only after the election has been completed does majoritarianism take hold, since the government (under a properly run election) is now representative of the public. [this reflects my 5-level election analysis]
STV does not disagree with FPP on the importance of majoritarian principles, but rather
interprets them differently.
A number of institutional elements within STV are in fact intentionally designed to favor majorities. [I am not sure that I agree - mostly STV and all PR is meant to guarantee minority (non-plurality) representation, majority or plurality representation are produced in FPTP system just fine.]
The Droop quota mathematically guarantees that [a group with the majority of votes in the district] will be able to win a majority of seats so long as there are an odd number of seats.
[usually anyway no one party in a district takes a majority of votes, nor a majority of seats - a majority decision is only guaranteed to be produced where only two candidates run, not the case in a developed political system.
This online site give example of majority party in a district not taking majority of seats under STV --- STV by Nicholas Tideman
The Single Transferable Vote (aeaweb.org) but yes STV works to prevent it happening often]
Furthermore, excess votes from candidates who surpass the Droop quota are fully redistributed before any other votes are even considered. Since the Droop quota is the lowest threshold possible to determine a winner [not true -- you can win with less than Droop, but yes because Droop is the lowest amount where no more than enough can take it], it maximizes the number of excess votes to be redistributed. A sufficiently sizeable and cohesive majority can elect multiple candidates or even theoretically fill all district seats before minority votes are ever considered.
[a full party slate elected on first count never has happened in any STV election. In first count all votes are counted even minority votes, so he is wrong about minority votes never being considered.]
While such an outcome is unlikely under normal circumstances, vote tabulation under STV does give an edge to majority groups. [I see little reason to say this, except the most-popular candidates (usually belonging to more popular parties) do survive longer and may receive transfers that early-eliminated candidates do not get, and how STV prevetns vote s;pitting which hurts large party's chances of getting its due share of seats more than small party's chances of getting one seat (the next point brought up by Hanner).]
[STV protects majorty interest as it prevents bad effects of vote splitting.]
A great deal of STV’s design is intended to avoid the "spoiler effect," a feature of FPP that undermines majoritarian principles. FPP tends to work best in two-candidate elections, as the entry of a third candidate may divert sufficient voters from one candidate to give victory to the remaining one whose base does not split.
The classic example is the 1912 American presidential election: Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the presidency with only 42 percent of the popular vote, thanks to the feud and subsequent divided vote between incumbent Republican William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt’s newly formed Progressive Party.
[as well, Trump's election in 2016 was victory for a minority candidate -- Trump did not have majority (but then neither did his more-popular opponent Clinton).]
Under STV, vote reallocation ensures that voters can cast a ballot for their preferred candidate, secure in the knowledge that a vote will go to their next best option if their first choice cannot have a seat. Majoritarian principles are secured, but based on a position of consensus-building rather than all-or-nothing.
Minority Representation.
[this actually is inverse of his previous argument - where before Hanner was saying STV helped majority groups, now he is saying it helps smaller groups.]
STV advocates often praise its ability to offer minority groups a chance at representation in government.
Under FPP, a district['s votes] split 51% to 49% between two groups of voters will formally silence the smaller group, no matter how slight the minority.
[where there are three or more candidates, as much as 82 percent of votes, shared out over five or more candidates, will be ignored.]
STV, on the other hand, uses multi-member districts designed to represent groups of voters [within the district] proportionally.
Vote reallocation reduces the challenge of coordination to build near-total consensus [or at least a purality] that often hampers minority groups under FPP, and minorities therefore have a better chance (though not guarantee) of winning seats in government under STV.
[as a single party will never win a one-party sweep of a distrcit's seats (where four or more seats are filled in the district), mixed representation of a majority and at least one minority group will both get representation, so that is guaranteed. in practical reality.]
Opponents of STV push back against this claim in a number of ways.
The first is by minimizing the value of minority representation. The argument goes that having a seat in government is not the same as having true influence in government.
Having officials who represent minorities makes little difference, since officials who are not members of the governing coalition “have little input into policy-making.”43 A small amount of input, however, is better than none at all. Through proportional seat allocation, STV gives minority groups a better chance of getting a place at the table of government than FPP. While the degree of power minority groups may have will likely differ from case to case, they will at least have a presence within the government apparatus, rather than having to resort to applying informal outside pressure to influence government policy.
anti-STV people may say FPP produces minority rep. in the district (true but at expense of local majority) and in the way local members may work (not true)
There are those who contend that FPP does a perfectly acceptable job of representing minorities already.
India holds Parliamentary elections under FPP, and in many places smaller regional parties have won several seats. Commentary in the Indian journal Economic and Political Weekly has suggested this indicates that FPP has a superior ability to protect minority interests than proportional representation.
44 This turns the discussion on its head, however.
The election of regional minority parties is a picture of the spoiler effect in action, not minority protection. The abundance of political parties in India frequently causes heavily-divided electorates and thus minority parties can [take local seats] with remarkably small pluralities. There are abhorrent disparities in Indian elections between vote share percentages and number of seats won per party, a fact somehow held up as a victory by EPW.
Minority group protection is important, but that does not mean allowing fringe groups to hijack the government. Although we often conceive of unrepresentative government in terms of minority exclusion, it is still a failure of proportionality if minority groups are over-represented.
[minority groups winning a few seats may not be over-representation but it does entail the majority of votes in the district being ignored, if the minority winner is elected with less than a majority of votes.
But a system that depends on accidental victories of plurality winners in odd little districts means large number of wasted votes, and the number of seat that a party might receive is not based on scientific fact but on chance, hence parties with more votes might take fewer seats and vica versa with no scientific basis.]
Another way that FPP advocates argue the system protects minorities is through the actions of officials [elected members] themselves.
For example, Canadian MP Herbert Grubel has publicly insisted that he listens to the concerns of all his constituents, including minority groups, and thus there is no need to move away from FPP.
Perhaps Mr. Grubel truly does take his district’s entire population into account in his actions as a government official, and if so, he ought to be commended. [But he can only vote one way each time he votes in the House of Commons so of course, he cannot reflect the views of all.]
Unfortunately, this is merely anecdotal evidence, and we cannot assume that every official elected under FPP will be so charitable.
Let us assume for the moment, however, that FPPelected officials do in fact listen to minority groups and fairly take them into account in their governmental actions. From a democratic perspective, simply lending an ear to minority groups is still subordinate to actually giving them a direct presence in government, no matter how fairly an FPP official weighs all their constituents.
Remember that the demos criterion derives from direct democracy. Under these conditions, minorities are not whispering in the ear of the majority and trusting them to advocate for minority interests. Every individual has a direct and equal vote.
The demos criterion can therefore only be satisfied if minority groups have a direct, proportional voice in government.
Value of Subsequent Preferences.
Opponents of STV argue that subsequent preferences do not [he means "should not"] have the same value as one’s primary preference.46 They therefore criticize the way STV handles ranking and reallocation. Under STV, a ballot is counted equally no matter how many times it has been reallocated. First-choice votes for a candidate carry the exact same weight as reallocated votes, no matter how low the candidate was initially ranked on a reallocated ballot. This appears unreflective of voters’ true beliefs and preferences.
[But some of those transferred vote have seen first and/or other upper preferences elected anyway, even if the vote was not used to elect that member]
Furthermore, it appears unfair to voters whose ballots are never reallocated if other voters get the chance to have their second, third, fourth, etc. choices each counted with every round of redistribution [vote can only be counted one time in the end]
It is worth noting that the Borda count also inherently endorses this criticism, as its design is largely meant to resolve this issue by weighting preferences relative to each other.
However, STV’s assigning of equal weight to reallocated ballots can be explained with an instrumental view. Ranked preferences and reallocation simply simulate perfect voter information. [and each vote can be counted only once at the end to elect someone.]
Imagine an election in a multi-member district with a wide variety of candidates, where
each person has only one vote, but also perfect information. Suppose you arrive at the voting booth and know that your preferred candidate already has enough votes to win a seat. Because they need no additional votes, you would almost certainly cast your vote for your next preferred candidate. [so as to get as many liked members elected as you can.]
Now suppose you arrive at the voting booth and know both that your preferred candidate has no chance of winning a seat, as well as the chances of every other candidate. You would most likely cast your ballot for the candidate whom you find most agreeable with a real chance at winning a seat. Perfect voter information of course cannot exist, but ranking and reallocation under STV simulate this scenario.
The instrumental perspective can be reduced even further. Imagine again a multi-member district election with a wide variety of candidates, where each person has one vote but not perfect information. Because so many candidates are running, the district decides to hold a series of run-off elections. Any candidate who meets the Droop quota wins a seat. Winning voters are not allowed to vote again [except to deal with surplus votes] -- if a winning candidate has additional votes beyond the Droop quota, a number of winning voters equal to the number of excess votes are randomly selected who are allowed to vote in one more round.
[explanatory footnote: 47 This is analogous to older STV elections, where ballots were randomly selected and reallocated from winning candidates until [their vote tally] dropped to
the Droop quota exactly. The more preferred method nowadays is to distribute Droop-excess votes ‘fractionally,’ in exact proportion to all winning-candidate voters’ second choices. This methodology is harder to incorporate into the metaphor, but is more precise and still preserves the one-person-one-vote value, even if a given person’s one vote is split fractionally across candidates.
[Here Hanner is confusing two different methods of transferring surplus votes:
Gregory method does use fractions but does involve more than just next usable back-up preference - the very vote is transferred but at fractional value, with part remaining behind with the winning candidate.
The whole-vote method only looks at the next usable preference (as he indicates) but does not use fractions.] )
After each round of voting, [actually in each round of the vote count, except where surplus votes are transferred] the least-popular candidate is knocked out.
[after the elimination], everyone presumably votes the same way except the voters of eliminated candidates, who presumably vote for their next-preferred choice. This process continues until only as many candidates remain as there are seats [or until all seats are filled by quota winners]. Holding an actual election under this procedure would clearly be overwhelming.
By using preference ranking, however, STV simulates this process in [a single polling of the electorate], with just one trip to the ballot box for voters.
Subsequent preferences may indeed not have the same value as first preferences. Every
individual voter will value their own preferences differently in relation to one another. STV does not weigh all preferences the same as a statement of political philosophy, however. Rather, it is a functional means of making the rank-voting process as efficient as possible while preserving the democratic principle of one person, one vote.
[under closed-list list PR, voters do not have choice over candidates so we don't even know if vote is used to elect the candidate of the voters choice.
And only partially under open-list PR.
under FPTP votes do not not see their vote transferred at all so back-up preferences do not come into it, but many or most votes are wasted in each district.]
Coalition Government.
FPP advocates argue that proportional voting systems have a strong tendency to produce coalition government. Primary objections to coalition government include arguments that it produces no clear government leader, gives no mandate to govern, and excessively privileges members inside the coalition over those outside of it.
48 These objections do not supersede the demos criterion, however. Avoiding a coalition government is not worth composing a Chamber unrepresentative of the public, often at the expense of minority groups.
Particularly worth refuting is the argument that FPP produces a clear and legitimate mandate to govern. While FPP does indeed produce a clear mandate, it does not come from the whole electorate, but rather the largest unified group of voters – who may not even make up a majority of the district. Under the demos criterion, a government is not legitimate unless its mandate comes from the entirety of the people, not just the most cohesive subset.
[no government is ever elected with all the votes cast.
the best we can hope for is the government reflects a majority of the votes cast]
At the same time, the concerns of many of FPP advocates regarding coalition government are not unfounded. Coalition’s constant process of negotiation and bargaining makes it inherently inefficient.49 Since non-coalition members are not necessary to approve policy, these officials have comparatively little influence.
[this seems to be loop back to argument about minority representation - a minority should have rep. (voice in the chamber) but not control of the chamber.]
50 These and other problems suggest that coalition government is worth avoiding;
however, coalitions under STV may take on a different character than ‘normal’ coalition government.
Most coalition governments occur under list-PR voting systems, which also tend to have parliamentary government structures.
51 Most study of coalition is therefore done under these conditions, but conditions under STV are markedly different. [actually STV is usually used in parliamentary governments, of the British Commonwealth.]
Under list-PR, parties take primacy over individual officials since the party chooses who
receives a seat, not voters. Officials are expected to show “complete adherence” to the party, and there is little to no opportunity to break from party lines and cast a dissenting vote.
52 Because parties are unified blocs, they have asymmetrical power relative to one another. This is especially true of some smaller parties, which despite their size can make or break a coalition by lending or withdrawing support. This capability can be used to wield disproportionate influence.
STV does tend to proportionally represent political parties.54 Parties may serve a number of valuable functions, and STV does not inherently preclude their existence.
STV does, however, empower voters to cast ballots based on candidates’ individual platforms rather than party affiliation.55
For example, Australian political parties will frequently distribute “how to vote” guides designed to achieve the party’s best possible outcome. In spite of this, voters often defect. Some do vote the straight ticket, but a significant amount list candidates from other parties, often mingled among those from their preferred party. [Farrell and McAllister, The Aus. Election Sytems, p. 134 shows tht 3/4ths or more vote along party lines.]
56 Officials [elected members] are elected based upon, and therefore have mandates originating from, their policy positions and not just their party base.
[policy is generally party base - but yes STV does allow candidate to get personal following in a way closed-list list-PR does not.]
Because officials elected under STV have personally-based mandates and greater independence from their parties, we might therefore predict multiple, flexible coalitions. Officials would be free to form a variety of coalitions based on the policy stances that got them elected, not necessarily the party line.
For example, the individual officials forming the ‘coalition’ governing national defense policy might be very different from those forming the coalitions on infrastructure, public health, immigration, welfare, etc. Parties could broadly be expected to stand together, but every party has borderline members, and officials under STV are freer to defect when they disagree with the party line.
Smaller parties would also have less power to make or break a flexible coalition, and thus would have influence more commensurate with their size. [But Hanner does not give examples where these intra-party flexible coalitions have been established in the past.]
[Hanner calls for presidential system in connection with STV]
Furthermore, problematic coalitions might be most effectively avoided if a presidential
system were partnered with STV. ...
[As I disgree with need for president, to be elected through single-winner election method, I have not copied the next few paragraphs where Hanner expanded on the need for president under STV]
... FPP advocates might use some real-world examples to push back against claims that STV avoids problems of coalition.
[I don't see why STV proponents would say STV does not produce coalitions. in fact producing coalitions is one of its charms - or at least one of its
benefical by-products. From that it draws democratic basis and stability.]
First, the three countries using STV at the national level (Australia, Ireland, and Malta) all currently or have previously had coalition governments.
Australia and Ireland, however, are descendants of the Westminster parliamentary system, and Malta also has a parliamentary government. As we have just discussed, parliamentary systems may naturally tend toward coalition out of necessity.
Until STV (electoral design) and parliamentarianism (institutional design) can be disentangled from one another, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from existing coalitions.
===
1973 Ireland -- Fine Gael and Labour "rigged" a coalition
STV opponents may also point to the 1973 Irish elections, in which the Fine Gael and Labour parties actively conspired together to form a coalition.61 Both parties asked their voters to give lower-rank votes to members of the other party, and successfully formed a governing coalition as a result.
While this is troubling, [why is this troubling?] the conditions in which two parties might knowingly collude to obtain mutual power under STV appear difficult and unstable.
First, the parties involved need to be mutually genial enough to willingly collude together in the first place. In the cutthroat world of politics, such a proposition seems fleeting.
Second, both parties must persuade enoughvoters to stick to the plan. The voting public has no obligation to listen to party leadership
and will likely break the plan unless a) the conspiring parties are ideologically close enough that voters would be willing to include the other party on their ballot and
b) both parties command enough respect from their bases to draw sufficient compliance.
Presuming all the criteria thus far are met, members of both parties must be kept in line. As we have already noted, STV’s design is highly unconducive to party discipline over candidates or officials.
Altogether, these factors mean that colluding to rig a coalition under STV is both difficult and unstable.
[Hanner seems to think "rigging a coalition ahead of the election is bad while organizing a coalition after an election is fine. why the difference? In fact "rigging" an coalition in advance gives voters knowledge of what might happen so is clear and transparent.]
Indeed, the FineGael/Labour coalition of 1973, preceded by four consecutive Fianna Fáil-led sessions [governments], lasted for only one session before it was overcome by Fianna Fáil yet again.
===
[voters are not obigated to go along with such coalition]
Additionally, recall that voters are unlikely to comply with this type of plan unless the colluding parties are relatively similar politically. If two parties have enough mutual harmony and popular support to successfully engineer a coalition, the governmental outcome likely will not differ dramatically from what the outcome otherwise would have been. The possibility of collusion is not ideal,
[why not? the same thing happens under FPTP in the composition of big-tent parties]
but no electoral system is perfect. We must choose the best among imperfect options, and FPP’s fundamental flaws far outweigh a remote, incidental scenario in STV.
FPP advocates also make a more remote argument regarding coalition that has not been
addressed yet. They contend that unpopular governments elected under PR systems cannot be ousted in the same way as under FPP, largely as a result of coalition politics.
62 Because "responsibility" for the government is dispersed across the electorate in a coalition, voters cannot point the finger at any one root cause of the problem and "vote the bastards out," as the saying goes. It must first be said that a reactionary, wholesale government dismissal does not seem like the most ideal prescription for a healthy body politic. [and anyway under FPT if majority of voters did not voe for the member they have little power to vote him or her out even if they choose to.]
Setting that aside, however, FPP arguments once again conflate STV with other PR systems, and STV indeed outperforms FPP by its own metric.
[FPTP allows extreme candidate/party rep in exceptional districts or due to lucky vote splitting]
Due to FPP’s plurality-wins rule, small and/or extreme parties can win districts where they are sufficiently unified and the rest of the electorate is fractured. Such an outcome would be remarkably difficult under STV, however, which aggregates voter preferences rather than using a simple plurality.
[I don't know about verb "aggregate" but STV does use larger districts than FPTP and the seats are allocated sicentifically within the district so under STV a small party gets only its due share of seats in the district.]
STV’s vote reallocation method successively eliminates candidates with low support, who we would expect to see primarily at the fringes of the political spectrum. This is designed to build the largest possible consensus around each official [elected member], and deeply unpopular governments would therefore be rare in the first place.
Supposing an unpopular official [candidate] did manage to get elected, though, STV’s candidate-centric design once again comes to its aid. If an official [elected member] is incompetent, corrupt, breaks campaign promises, or otherwise alienates their constituents, STV certainly allows voters to individually target and vote them out.
[STV allows the elected member's previous supporters to change their vote so as to deny the member the seats and the voters would not necessarily have to switch parties to do so.]
Strategic Voting.
Another case made against STV is that it makes strategic voting difficult, if not impossible.63 FPP advocates tend to favor the ability to vote strategically, arguing that people ought to be able to easily size up an election and develop a strategy accordingly. By casting a strategic vote, voters maximize the benefit they derive from the election.
STV makes developing a strategy virtually impossible, even given perfect voter information, and therefore should be disfavored.
64
Though certain patterns might be predictable on a broad scale, the number of possible ballot variations for every individual voter and ripple effects caused by any change make precise forecasting a futile prospect. In an election under any voting system, voters have sincere preferences and a best likely result from the election, and thus face the following proposition when casting a ballot:
overlap between sincere preference and best likely result is the straightforward choice.
The demos criterion requires voters to express sincere preferences, but political science and game theory tell us that rational voters will pursue their best likely result from an election, even if it goes against their sincere preference.65
STV’s design mitigates this conflict by seeking to maximize the overlap between sincere preferences and best likely results.
We may say a voter has a straightforward choice when they have incentive to cast a ballot reflecting their sincere preference.
All voters preferring the most likely winning candidate(s) plus the next most likely face a straightforward choice.
66 Every other voter has incentive to strategically vote for their most preferred candidate among the above set. The maximum percentage of voters with incentive to vote strategically under any voting system [where votes are not transferred] can therefore be defined as:
1 – (seats plus 1/ number of candidates)
[this formula does not produce a percentage.
to get percentage, we need to say
(1 – ((seats plus 1/ number of candidates)) X 100)]
In a three-candidate race under FPP, at least 2/3 of voters have a straightforward choice, but the rest face a choice to vote strategically.
[yes, assuming voters know the portion of votes each candidate will take]
67 If a voter believes their sincerely preferred candidate has no realistic chance of winning, they may vote against that candidate in favor of one whom they consider merely acceptable, but who has a better shot at victory. Many FPP ballots therefore may express insincere preferences.
[STV obliviates any need for strategic voting because if vote is not used for first preference, it will be transferred in most cases.
But Heanner examines why even if STV was X voting it would not encourage same level of strategic voting as FPTP. Perhaps this discussion is applicable to SNTV!]
STV’s use of multiple seats immediately increases the proportion of voters with straightforward choices and thus the expression of sincere preferences. As long as the previous equation equals less than 1/3 for an STV election, more voters are likely to have straightforward choices than under FPP.
Ranking and [transfers] further increase the incentive to vote for sincere preferences,
since voters do not face the same all-or-nothing proposition as under FPP. Even if a voter’s first choice does not have sufficient support to be elected, the voter is secure in the knowledge that their ballot will be [transferred] until it lands on their most-preferred candidate who does have sufficient support [if at all possible] A voter thus has nothing to lose from listing their preferences in sincere order, and we can expect them to do so. STV ballots therefore will tend to reflect voters’ preferences more accurately than the supposedly sacred one true preference of an FPP ballot.
Some STV critics attempt to turn this argument on its head by conceding the position that strategic voting should be mitigated, but then seeking to show that PR systems (STV included) actually increase the prevalence of strategic voting (or at least perform no better than FPP).
68 The metric used to make this claim, however, is voter defection from a sincerely preferred party to one with a better chance of winning.
Voters do defect more under PR systems than FPP [Do they? i Hanner previously said they are not encouraged to do so.], but this is a flawed metric.
Duverger’s Law states that FPP will inherently tend toward a two-party system.69 Outsider parties may briefly arise, but will quickly either wither away or be absorbed into one of the main parties.
Using defection from outsider parties as a metric to measure strategic voting is flawed because there are fewer outsider parties to defect from under FPP. Even the research group that found supposedly equal incidence of strategic voting between PR and FPP admitted that “there are of course differences in what constitutes a major party in each type of system.”70 Not only will STV tend to promote a variety of parties, but since it has multiple seats per district and a variety of parties may win seats, it has a broader definition than FPP of what makes a party be considered ‘major.’
Some FPP advocates further suggest STV’s ranking mechanism gives rise to perverse incentives regarding how many candidates to rank on the ballot. Steven Brams and Peter Fishburn argue that a voter might gain an advantage by only ranking their first-choice candidate and no subsequent preferences.
71 However, a voter trying to exploit the conditions described would need to have virtually perfect information, which even Brams and Fishburn concede is extremely unrealistic.
Furthermore, Michael Dummett makes the exact opposite argument: he claims voters
will be hurt by truncating their ballots under STV, and ought to rank as many candidates as possible.
72 The fact that these scholars have reached such precisely antithetical conclusions points to the near-impossibility of strategy building under STV.
Because attempting to game the system is so impractical, voters under STV are best off expressing their sincere preferences.
Non-Monotonicity and Monotonic Failure.
A voting system is defined as monotonic when a candidate cannot be harmed by receiving additional votes (or in ranked-voting systems, being ranked more highly), or vice versa, all else equal. [most presentations of non-monotonicity do not say all else equal but merely imply or assume it to be a given. And in fact most break that rule, either another candidate must get fewer votes or the total number of votes must be increased - "all other things" do not remain equal.]
If a system does not meet this condition, it is called non-monotonic. Put another way, non-monotonicity occurs when it is possible to make a winning candidate lose by ranking them higher or to make a losing candidate win by ranking them lower.
(Forward monotonic failure (FMF) occurs when a candidate is defeated due to higher ranking (more votes),
and backward monotonic failure (BMF) occurs when a candidate wins despite higher ranking (fewer votes).
Simply because a possibility exists does not mean it will be realized, however. When non-monotonic properties actually manifest themselves, then it is called monotonic failure. A prominent study by Gideon Doron and Richard Kronick73 demonstrated that STV is non-monotonic, a discovery later elaborated upon by Steven Brams and Peter Fishburn.74
The controversy over monotonicity is currently the most active site of debate regarding
STV’s adoption. Not only do many FPP advocates consider non-monotonicity to be STV’s fatal flaw, it is also the lynchpin of Michael Dummett’s argument against STV in favor of the Borda count, which is monotonic.
However, determining the true impact of non-monotonicity is extremely difficult. The greatest roadblock is that monotonic failure by definition is a counterfactual.75 Seeing how voters did vote is relatively easy – one simply needs to obtain the full set of ballots. Proving monotonic failure, however, requires knowing how many voters might have voted a certain way under different circumstances, all else equal. Given the sheer number of permutations possible on an STV ballot and how any change may have extensive ripple effects, this prospect is virtually hopeless. Real-world data on STV elections is relatively scarce, as we have mentioned, and building realistic models to draw conclusions is easier said than done.
Unless a real-life STV election must change its outcome as a result of discovering an error where rankings were incorrectly recorded on certain ballots, it is practically impossible to definitively prove monotonic failure. These factors present serious challenges for both advocates and opponents of STV to make comprehensive arguments, but the evidence we do have suggests that STV’s non-monotonicity may not be as disastrous as supposed.
First, Doron and Kronick’s landmark model proving STV’s non-monotonicity is quite contrived. While the model technically uses STV, its electoral design is atrocious. The district has only two seats, while at least five is generally considered to provide optimal proportionality.
There are only four candidates, twenty-six voters, and five unique ballot profiles (four in the D’ example demonstrating monotonic failure). Although one could reasonably predict certain ranking trends based on ideological patterns, such a lack of diversity in ballot profiles seems misleading. The Brams and Fishburn examples are similarly contrived, using poor electoral design and a small sample size. The studies achieve their purpose of showing that STV has non-monotonic qualities, but do little to suggest that monotonic failure would occur under real-world conditions.
Second, both of these examples and in fact most discussions of STV’s non-monotonicity
(even by STV advocates), tend to treat candidates in a vacuum, with no regard to their placement on a political axis. For example, using the ‘real’ election D in Doron and Kronick’s model (as opposed to D’, which demonstrates monotonic failure), candidate proximity scores for the four candidates W, X, Y, and Z can be calculated. These scores show how many voters ranked two given candidates directly adjacent to one another. Results are shown in Figure 2.
For example, the top row indicates that four voters ranked W directly before or after X, five ranked W directly before or after Y, and seventeen ranked W before or after Z.
... [explanation not copied]
Michael Dummett also accuses STV of being “quasi-chaotic” and electing officials [members] “virtually [at] random” because monotonic failure occurs under STV as a result of the order in which candidates are eliminated.
But if monotonic failure likely affects only spatially adjacent candidates, it is not random, and in fact is quite systematic. Dummett treats candidates in a vacuum rather than interrelated points on a political axis. Monotonic failure is certainly not ideal, but also not nearly as disastrous as STV opponents suggest.
If there were to be an incident of monotonic failure under STV, it seems most likely to only affect spatially adjacent candidates, resulting in tolerable differences in outcome.
The most pressing question, of course, is how often we might expect monotonic failure to actually occur under STV. Possibility in theory does not necessarily mean likelihood in practice.
Answering this question has proved difficult, however. When Doron and Kronick proved STV was subject to monotonic failure, most STV advocates simply dismissed it as a remote possibility and unlikely to affect an actual election, but this was based on intuition rather than data.
The most concerted effort to establish a real answer has been by Nicholas Miller, who in a 2002 drafted but unpublished paper was able to develop graphical models using triangles (representing three-candidate races) and depict the ‘spaces’ inside them where monotonic failure would actually occur.80 While the models were somewhat workable, Miller hit a dead end in using them to arrive at a definitive conclusion.
Since then, most research involving monotonicity failure has been done on three-candidate IRV rather than STV, but since both systems use the same elimination mechanism, some useful insights may still be extracted.
There are two types of monotonic failure.
Forward monotonic failure (FMF) occurs when a candidate is defeated due to higher ranking,
and backward monotonic failure (BMF) occurs when a candidate is victorious due to lower ranking. Perverse incentives are stronger to manipulate BMF than FMF [I don't know what this means]; one may actually increase a preferred candidate’s chance at election by ranking them lower. [he just said this so don't know what he meant by repeating it - perhaps he meant - and does say later - trying to win by lowering votes is not likely to succeed and perverse, while giving more votes to a preferred candiate is true to hope and then disappointingly dashed by the meachanics of STV - sometimes.
BMF is both improbable and risky to try and manipulate under the elimination mechanism used by both IRV and STV, wherein the least-popular candidate is [successively] eliminated.83
It is estimated that 5.74% of three-candidate IRV elections have conditions where either type of monotonic failure may occur, with an actual predicted incidence of at least 1.97%.84 Vulnerability to monotonic failure also increases with the size of the electorate.85 [this statement is counter to expectation and logic -- when thousands of votes are valid, the change of one vote is not likely to change the outcome.]
Conditions differ between STV and IRV, however.
STV tends to have larger districts and thus electorates, but also more candidates running since districts have multiple seats. How these factors may effect monotonic failure under STV compared to IRV is difficult to determine, especially since no STV election is the same. The number of voters, seats, candidates, and relative popularity between candidates may vary wildly between districts and elections. Each of these factors has a direct impact on whether or not monotonic failure occurs.
It would also be practically impossible for voters to strategically exploit monotonic failure.86 While one or more voters could theoretically engineer a monotonic failure to their advantage, the actual likelihood would be negligible, especially as the number of voters needed increased. [two votes are not likely to make a difference] As we have discussed, ballot strategizing under STV is virtually futile.
If monotonic failure actually were to occur, it would almost certainly be the result of chance. Most likely, indecisive voters would rank one candidate slightly higher or lower than another who they preferred to a similar degree. Given these conditions, both candidates would most likely be adjacent to one another on a spatial model. Monotonic failure would therefore have a minimal effect on the Chamber’s representativeness, and thus not violate the demos criterion. [Hanner here is assuming that the one who gets more votes and is denied a seat is close in belief to the candidate who is now eliminated, which is not ture - the one who is now eliminated does not -- does not -- give most of its votes to the first candiate. if it did, there would be not be the failure.]
Brams and Fishburn argue that STV’s non-monotonicity violates a “fundamental democratic ethic.”87 This thesis argues, however, that the fundamental democratic ethic is in fact the demos criterion – to represent the people as accurately as possible.
Non-monotonicity is certainly not an ideal feature in a voting system, but it does not violate the demos criterion.
Monotonic failure is a mathematical peculiarity arising from the computational mechanism STV uses to determine winners. It cannot realistically be manipulated or exploited, and is virtually impossible to detect due to its counterfactual nature.
It is possible but unlikely to occur, and if it does occur, unlikely to have a meaningful effect on the representativeness of the Chamber itself.
[weaknesses of FPTP]
FPP, on the other hand, although it is a monotonic system, soundly fails the demos criterion:
i. Voters are not able to express preferences with accuracy or nuance. Ballots can only
express a single preference.
ii. Voters are not incentivized to express sincere preferences. Since one can only vote for a single candidate and elections are winner-take-all, many voters have incentive to
cast strategic ballots with insincere preferences.
iii. FPP does not compose Chambers representative of the public. Due both to electoral
design and perverse incentives, there are often significant disparities between public preferences and the composition of Chambers under FPP.
Concluding Remarks.
If one accepts the demos criterion as the primary democratic standard, the Single Transferable Vote ought to be the voting system adopted for elections to compose a Chamber. It is not perfect, and it has flaws that are not present in the Borda count, list-PR, or even first-past-thepost.
No system can ever be perfect, however, and STV’s benefits outweigh both its own drawbacks and the benefits of other systems.
It allows voters to express their preferences accurately and with nuance,
incentivizes the casting of sincere ballots,
and tends to form chambers representative of the public, given preferences expressed in the election.
This thesis merely serves as a theoretical and philosophical defence of STV. While it does advocate for STV’s adoption, it is not meant to serve as a comprehensive policy proposal.
In the real world, a nation ought to expect numerous challenges in undertaking a transition from holding elections under one system to adopting STV. These challenges may warrant modifications to the system, and in certain cases may suggest that another electoral system besides STV may in fact fulfill the demos criterion better.
However, under the standard conditions of forming a representative governmental body, STV ought to be the preferred electoral system unless proven otherwise.
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